- Key insights: Paze is the official patch sponsor of the NBA's Atlanta Hawks.
- What's at stake: The online checkout solution hopes to garner more exposure from the sport.
- Forward look: Paze will also serve as the official online checkout partner and digital wallet of the team and its stadium, the State Farm Arena.
Early Warning Service's online checkout app Paze is venturing into professional sports with a five-year partnership with the National Basketball Association's Atlanta Hawks, betting major league sports is the ticket to public awareness.
Paze will become the official jersey patch partner of the Hawks and serve as the official online checkout partner and digital wallet of both the team and its home facility, the State Farm Arena.
"This is the beginning of the journey to build the [Paze] brand," Serge Elkiner, general manager of Paze, told American Banker. "Basketball is a sport that we want to associate ourselves with. [It represents] trust, teamwork, collaboration, speed, which are all of the things that we want Paze to represent as a payment system for the consumer."
Paze is hoping to capitalize on the exposure a professional sports franchise and its most valuable advertising asset provide as it looks to replicate Zelle's success in becoming a household name. Eight years after its launch, Early Warning Services'
Why sports?
Sports franchises are great places for brands to advertise because it provides higher exposure rates when compared with other channels where sponsorships might seem more generic and less targeted to niche fan interests, Emarketer analyst Marisa Jones told American Banker.
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Payment and financial services brands have long
Stadium naming rights have also become popular among financial services companies. SoFi has naming rights to the stadium where the NFL's
That exposure doesn't come cheap, though. SoFi reportedly paid as much as $30 million per year to get its company name on the stadium in Los Angeles, according to Bloomberg. Northwest Federal Credit Union reportedly paid between $8 million and $9 million per year to get its name on the stadium in Landover, Maryland, according to Sports Business Journal.
Paze did not disclose financial terms of the partnership. Patch partnerships in the NBA can run between the mid-seven figures to low-eight figure range per year, depending on the team's geographic location and how well the team performs.
Jersey patch as the 'crown jewel'
In sports, the jersey patch is considered the "crown-jewel asset," Andrew Slatzman, president of business enterprise and chief commercial officer of the Atlanta Hawks and the State Farm Arena, told American Banker. The NBA first added the patch program in 2017.
"The jersey patch is the only asset that travels with our team everywhere we go. It is literally and figuratively emblazoned on the Hawks jersey," Slatzman said. "If we play the New York Knicks, we have a home broadcast in Atlanta and it's being broadcast in New York. You're picking up eyeballs and exposure and impressions in those markets. Then you have games that are nationally televised."
The Atlanta Hawks have 13 nationally televised games in the 2025-26 NBA season, compared with 34 for the top nationally televised teams.
And basketball brings eyeballs. The 2024-25 NBA regular season averaged 1.53 million viewers across ABC, ESPN and TNT, according to Sports Media Watch. And nearly 17 million people watched 2024's NBA finals.
The rise of social media has further amplified the marketing reach of the patch, Tyler Reed, founder and CEO of Bizwrite Digital PR, told American Banker.
"It's valuable real estate and guarantees that the Paze logo will be seen in every game broadcast, every highlight reel, and every social media post, from the team, the athletes themselves, and from sports influencers," Reed said. "That kind of exposure ensures a global reach far exceeding traditional ad spend."
What's the return on investment?
Not everyone is convinced that naming rights to stadiums or general sports sponsorships net the sort of return on investment that proponents claim they offer.
Michael Leeds, a professor of economics and director of undergraduate studies at Temple University whose research centers around the economics of sports, said that buying naming rights often did not increase a company's bottom line.
"I hear marketing-types constantly praising the value of visibility and branding in these deals, and to be honest, I don't get it," Leeds said. "Doesn't it all come down to profit in the end? Why should I care if everyone knows about my mousetrap if no one is buying it?"
A 2007 paper on the naming rights announcements for NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB involving publicly held companies written by Leeds and co-authors Eva Marikova Leeds and Irina Pistolet found that in most cases, buying naming rights did not affect the profitability of the company.
"In a small handful of cases, the company became more profitable," Leeds said. "In two to three times as many cases, the company became less profitable."
The study looked at "holding period returns," or the value of holding a stock from one day to the next. "Holding period returns" relies on what's called the "efficient markets hypothesis," which states that investors respond immediately to all available information, he said.
"Hence, if a naming rights deal is announced, investors who believe this purchase will add to a company's profits will immediately buy stock in the company, which will cause the firm's stock price to rise above trend," Leed said.
"Our conclusion was that buying naming rights did not do much and to the extent it had any impact, the effect was likely to be negative," he said.
Partnerships that were most likely to have a positive impact were those that related directly to the sport or event. For example, "an STP ad on a stock car would be more successful than an ad for Corn Flakes," Leeds said.
"I am more than a little skeptical of the match between Paze and the NBA," Leeds said. "That seems more like Corn Flakes and Nascar than STP and Nascar."
For Paze, the partnership with the Atlanta Hawks is more than just the national exposure the brand can garner from its association with the team; it's a way to plug into the city of Atlanta, its small businesses, and its larger financial services ecosystem, Elkiner said.
"Atlanta has been a financial hub for the last few decades, and has grown to a massive community of fintechs – 245-plus fintechs are in Atlanta," Elkiner said. "It's called 'transaction alley.' Big, global e-commerce enablers and gateways and acquirers are sitting in Atlanta. Seventy percent of global financial transactions go through an Atlanta-based company. It made a lot of sense."
Paze is hoping to take advantage of inroads the Hawks franchise has with small businesses in the city amid a 50-acre, $5 billion revitalization project in downtown Atlanta called Centennial Yards.
"That aspect of the small business community and the impact the Hawks have on that small business community, was extremely important to us when we chose the partnership with the Hawks," Elkiner said, noting that Paze is now working to integrate with the organization's ticketing system and, eventually, its app for concession purchases.
